Introducing your SAVMA Secretary Jennifer Linton

Name, Position on EB: Jenn Linton

School and Year: University of Pennsylvania, 2012

Hometown: Redding, CT

Your area of interest within veterinary medicine: Equine Medicine!! I love ambulatory and reproduction. 

Description of what your office entails: I take minutes at all Executive Board Conference Calls, HOD Meetings, EB meetings during symposium, and (now) the SCAVMA President's Meeting. I also make the AVMA Convention and SAVMA Symposium binders. 

Your favorite thing about holding that office: Spending time with the other members of the EB, sitting in on the SCAVMA Presidents meeting to understand what's going on at other schools, and meeting members of the AVMA Executive Board

Something exciting that your office is doing/has done for vet students this past year: We're working on making the EB meetings more transparent by sending out brief synopses to the delegates, who can then send the information to their delegations, to make sure that issues move swiftly through SAVMA and are addressed in a timely manner. 

Your favorite SCAVMA related experience thus far (EB or not): Meeting my long-lost sister, Claire McPhee. And making friends at every veterinary school in the nation!

Something fun about yourself: I love hiking (which is why I can't wait to get back to New England). I love playing basketball and volleyball, and my study breaks during exam times involve reading Shakespeare and Jane Austen (nerd through and through!).  

 

Introducing your SAVMA President Elect Bridget Heilsberg

Greetings from the AVMA Convention! Next officer up is your President Elect Bridget Heilsberg:

Name, Position on EB:  Bridget Heilsberg, President-Elect

School and Year:  Colorado State University, Second Year

Hometown:  Ravena, NY

Your area of interest within veterinary medicine:  Equine Orthopedic Surgery and Sports Medicine

Description of what your office entails:  I am training to be the President of SAVMA, which means preparing to represent all 12,000 of you and being your voice at the national level.  I attend AVMA HOD and Executive Board meetings to meet people and get a feeling of how things are run, and I work closely with Joe regarding the future of SAVMA and the meeting-to-meeting business of a national organization.  I pay attention to the AVMA Newsletters, SAVMA Newsletters, SAVMA President's Forum, and SAVMA Delegate's Forum to keep myself in tune with current events and issues in veterinary medicine.

Your favorite thing about holding that office:  The chance to make a real difference for veterinary students everywhere!

Something exciting that your office is doing/has done for vet students this past year:  Reworked the SAVMA Governance Documents to make them more streamlined, modern, and efficient for the House of Delegates.  Our meetings are now more focused on enacting change in Veterinary Medical Education, not just following procedure.

Your favorite SCAVMA related experience thus far:  Definitely working extremely hard on the Duty Hours Proposal and then having the House of Delegates pass the motion for endorsement!  I think we are going to do such great things for the profession, and I'm very excited to see what we do next.

Something fun about yourself:  I drove a 34' combat patrol boat in the Persian Gulf, with four machine guns on it, in both Kuwait and Iraqi national waters.  I was the first of four qualified female Coxswains for the boat crews, and the only qualified female Patrol Leader in the unit.  I also have a hidden addiction for cute shoes!

Introducing Your SAVMA Executive Board: Joe Esch, President

In honor of the American Veterinary Medical Association convention to be held in St. Louis officially beginning today and the SAVMA House of Delegates meetings that will accompany it, here is an introduction to YOUR SAVMA Executive Board, position by position.  First of all- your President, Joe Esch:

Name, Position on EB:  Joe Esch, SAVMA President

School and Year:  The Ohio State University, 2012

Your area of interest within veterinary medicine:  Small Animal General Practice

Description of what your office entails: The SAVMA President represents all SAVMA veterinary students and presides at all meetings of the SAVMA House of Delegates and Executive Board meetings.  The president also represents SAVMA in the AVMA House of Delegates and as a non-voting member of the AVMA Executive Board. 

Your favorite thing about holding that office:  I really enjoy being able to advocate for veterinary students on the national level.

Something exciting that your office is doing/has done for vet students this past year: Something really exciting for me is the changes that we are trying to make with regards to communication.  It is my hope that we can increase communication about what SAVMA and SCAVMA is and the benefits to being a SCAVMA member.

Your favorite SCAVMA related experience thus far: SAVMA Symposium is by far my favorite SAVMA related experience, and they all have been excellent!

Something fun about yourself:  I have an 11 year old smooth collie.

Konza Prairie

By Stephanie Macinski

Kansas State University

Ureteritis

By Krista Morrow
Washington State University
Class of 2013

                As freshman students, we learned a game in pathology lab to practice correctly describing inflammation of certain organs. For example, if the spleen in an animal has signs of inflammation, you would refer to this as splenitis. To play the game, we went around in a circle in front of 25 or so peers, and one at a time named an organ for the next person to label. Some of us were more devious than others and thought up crafty ways to stump our classmates. They named obscure anatomies of the eyeball or other such parts that anatomy class didn’t even cover, sure enough causing profuse stammering and blotchy red faces.  Luckily I was given easier organs to describe.  

                However, I had to leave the lab every 15-20 minutes in the middle of a practically rib-breaking coughing fit (leftover from a nasty, long lasting virus all my classmates had that year-what we lovingly remember as the Plague of the Class of 2013). The game had ended by the time I had finished coughing up a lung, and the professor was asking us if we had any questions about organs we might have missed. Of course there would be a test!

                I’m usually a pretty quiet person, and especially as an awkward first year student didn’t typically enjoy asking questions in front of my classmates. However, I was drugged on cough syrup, Dayquil and had eaten more than the suggested dose of cough drops in one day than a person should consume in a week. I suppose I was in a drunkenly brave state of mind. “What would you call inflammation of the ureter?” I asked. Immediately I could feel some weird glances, and my teacher had paused and was kind of quizzingly staring at me. “Well, if you hadn’t have been in the bathroom, you would have known the answer to that question!” a classmate joked with me, and the rest giggled at their perceived irony of the situation. (I didn’t have to leave for the bathroom 4 times, I really was just coughing!) So apparently ureteritis had been asked about already.  Moral of the story-you don’t die from asking silly questions, but it would behoove one to stay quiet on days when one is drugged up on cough syrup!